"You've been looking at me like that all day," she said.
"I look at you like that all day every day."
"Today was more."
"Today you were more." He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, stopping behind her. In the mirror, she watched him reach up and take the second earring from her fingers, setting it beside the first on the vanity tray. "You were happy. It shows."
"I'm always happy."
"Not like today." His hands moved to her hair, finding the pins that held it up, removing them one by one with the slow attention of a man with nowhere to be. "Today you were—luminous. Every person in that garden was watching you and you didn't notice."
"I noticed you watching."
"I'm always watching."
Her hair came down around her shoulders and she felt him run his fingers through it, spreading it, his hands warm.
"Two years ago," she said.
"Mm."
"Do you remember the first morning after our wedding? You left before I woke up."
"I remember."
"I lay in that bed and thought—" She stopped, shook her head. "It doesn't matter now."
"Tell me."
She met his eyes in the mirror. "I thought:this is what the rest of my life looks like.Waking up alone. Trying to be fine." She reached up and covered his hand with hers. "I thought I could survive it. I was very good at surviving things."
"You are," he said. "You were. You survived me."
"I did more than survive you." She stood, turning to face him. "I got you."
He looked at her—at his wife, at the woman who had quietly dismantled every wall he'd built by the simple method of not requiring them to come down, just waiting patiently on the other side until he'd opened the door himself.
"You did," he said. "Completely and entirely. Every last piece."
He kissed her—and it was different from the first kiss and from the balcony and from the beach, the way every kiss had been different because every kiss was its own moment, but underneath it was the same thing it had always been: honest.
She kissed him back with her hands in his hair and her whole self in it.
He walked her backward toward the bed, his mouth never leaving hers, unhurried, thorough, a man who had learned that his wife deserved to be taken his time over.
"Tell me what you want," he murmured against her lips.
"You," she said. "All of you. Slowly."
"Slowly," he repeated, like a promise.
He undressed her with the care he'd developed over two years of learning her—each revealed thing attended to, his mouth following his hands with quiet intentionality. The curve of her shoulder. The inside of her wrist. The place below her ear thatmade her breath catch, which he'd discovered six weeks into their marriage and had never forgotten.
She worked his shirt open, her palms spreading flat against his chest, feeling the familiar architecture of him.
"I love you," she said.
"I know." He pressed his lips to her collarbone. "I love you too. I love you continuously and completely and with a thoroughness that I find mildly alarming."
